William Woodruff, who has died aged 92, was a formidable scholar of history, with a critical take on American clumsiness in world affairs. But he never forgot his origins in a Lancashire milltown when King Cotton's throne was falling apart, and while academic and literary honours poured his way, he kept a weaver's shuttle on the desk in his American office to keep things in perspective.

Brains, guts and energy saw him escape from the Depression of the 1930s, first to London, then Oxford University and a series of professorships in Europe, Australia, Japan and finally the US. But his loyalty to northern England, whose dropped aitches he retained until his death, was returned in a remarkable way in his final decade.

Always a careful observer and skilled writer, Woodruff - then 77 and comfortably settled in two wooded acres of Gainsville, Florida - decided to revisit the world of cobbles, shawls and men with poles "tapping up" millworkers by rapping on their bedroom windows before dawn. The resulting autobiography, The Road to Nab End, was little-noticed until its pocket-sized publisher became part of the Little, Brown empire. Republished in 2000, it is a worldwide bestseller.

He captured both the despair and the soaring spirit of humanity that made his young life rich. He was sensitive but seldom sentimental. Praised for the way he had used his talents to rise to wealth and eminence, he would counter by remembering the might-have-beens. These included his grandmother Bridget, who loved books and encouraged him to do the same.

"She was very talented, and look where it got her," he would say. "She ended up in the Blackburn workhouse."

Woodruff was born in Blackburn to a family of cotton workers. His father was serving on the western front when his mother, who already had three small children, went into premature labour while working at the mill. He used to fall asleep regularly at school because he had to moonlight on errands to help the family's miserable income.

By 13, school was an unaffordable luxury, and the boy took a job delivering groceries - a lucky break at a time when the regional economy was collapsing. He had learned of a wider world through a Lifebuoy Soap encyclopedia, which he devoured at home, and wrote to a Russian trade delegation, asking for work in the Soviet Union. There was no reply, so he wrapped up his basic possessions and ran away to London.

Life in the capital was more of the same. He worked as a "sand boy", filling moulds in a foundry at Bow in the East End. But, as he went on to describe in his second volume of memoirs, Beyond Nab End, he was spotted by trade union organisers as a lad with a lively mind.

Woodruff would later reflect where this came from, returning again to the wealth of latent talent in working class Lancashire. In his autobiographies, he contrasts fierce loyalties and the warmth of the co-operative, neighbourly systems that engendered them, with greed and irresponsibility further up the social scale. He summed up pre-Depression financial speculation and the associated credit bubble as "madness reigning".

He won a place at the Catholic Workers' College (later Plater College), Oxford, through the classic socialist path of a London county council scholarship. His tutors included the prominent Fabian GDH Cole, and he included among his friends Harold Wilson.

When the second world war broke out, Woodruff told the future prime minister that he was enlisting, to which Wilson replied: "Good luck Woody, but I've been called to higher things. I'm going to work with (William) Beveridge" (on economic warfare and, later, the creation of the National Health Service). Woodruff maintained that he was a better speaker than Wilson, but turned down approaches that would have led to his election as a Labour MP.

Instead, he went to Harvard as a Fulbright scholar and began his academic career. He published 61 books, including a history of the British rubber industry, a work which he invested with his trademark liveliness, vision and fun. In one footnote, he complained that he had found only one 19th-century article about contraceptives.

Curiously, this subject was to help establish his fame with The Road to Nab End. The book was originally published as Billy Boy, which failed to appeal, but that was not the reason why Little, Brown changed its title. Billy Boy, one of their staff told his colleagues, was the name of a best-selling German contraceptive.

Woodruff's autobiographical success did not surprise his modest band of existing fans, particularly those familiar with his novel about the landing at Anzio, Vessel of Sadness (1969). He took part in the invasion of Italy, and the book, which has been compared with All Quiet on the Western Front, was described by the historian AL Rowse as one of the most sensitive and moving accounts to be told about the second world war.

Woodruff leaves two sons from his first marriage, to Katherine Wright, who died of cancer in 1959, and four sons and a daughter from his second marriage in 1960 to Helga, who survives him.

Eric Hobsbawm writes: I first met Bill Woodruff in the late 1940s or early 1950s, almost certainly through the Economic History Society. Academia was small then and any two young economic historians would get to know one another. Somehow, though not friends, we kept track of each other across the oceans.

After we had both retired, he surprised me by sending me his first instalment of Billy Boy, issued by a local publisher in Halifax in 1993. I read it with amazement and boundless admiration and said so to anyone who would listen.

I think this helped to get it more widely published as The Road to Nab End, and it was thoroughly deserved that it became a bestseller. It will remain one of the classics of 20th-century British life and good writing. The second volume, Beyond Nab End, though also remarkably well-written and vividly told, lacked the childhood unity of Billy Boy, but it will stand as a memorial to a good man and an indomitable spirit.

• William Woodruff, economic historian and writer, born September 12 1916; died September 23 2008